Three Days in Moscow Quotes

“He was mocked by his critics for being an empty suit, yet he was a careful, studious chief executive—a voracious reader and talented writer who often left his speechwriters in awe.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream—to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters. Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“He also pointed out to Reagan that the United States was engaged in a debate about building a fence between the United States and Mexico, although the analogy didn’t fly with Reagan. He informed Gorbachev that a fence might be necessary because so many people wanted to come into the United States, not because they wanted to leave!”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“In my opinion, the root of these problems lies right here—in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a ‘buddy’ system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Today, nine nations have nuclear programs—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Iran threatens, and it is naïve to think a nuclear Iran is impossible.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot,” Margaret Thatcher declared in 1991.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“when he walked outside, they burst into song. He tried to speak, but they kept singing. Puzzled, Reagan asked Wałęsa what they were singing. He replied, “May you live 100 years.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“the leaders would meet on the Mediterranean island of Malta in December. Notably,”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“That means you agree to never criticize them again.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“A people free to choose will always choose peace. . . .”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“A secret poll of six hundred Poles taken by Paris Match in 1983 found that they identified Poland’s last hope as being, in order, the pope, the Virgin Mary, and Ronald Reagan.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Harry Truman once said that, ultimately, our security and the world’s hopes for peace and human progress “lie not in measures of defense or in the control of weapons, but in the growth and expansion of freedom and self-government.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“(Perhaps they were recalling the fate of William Henry Harrison, who had caught a cold at his bitterly frigid 1841 inauguration and died of pneumonia a month later.)”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“his Camp David golf cart, dubbed “Golf Cart One”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“and a scathing quote from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters: “The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered . . . in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“The final vote was 1,187 for Ford and 1,070 for Reagan. Reagan fell short by only 117 delegates.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“(When he’d received his first pair of glasses as a child, he’d been amazed to see that trees had leaves!)”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Life I wonder what it’s all about, and why We suffer so, when little things go wrong? We make our life a struggle, When life should be a song.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can do it if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, midwestern farming communities were struggling, and certainly Reagan’s family didn’t have extra funds for his education. But he set his sights on Eureka College, seventy-five miles from home, and secured a football scholarship for half his tuition, which was $400. The remainder he paid for with his lifeguarding savings, and he was given a job to cover his board, first washing dishes in a fraternity house. By his junior year, he was working as a lifeguard and official swim coach.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“vigilance. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“lay me down and bleed awhile . . . although I am wounded, I am not”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Reagan never forgot the emotional impact of being at the wall. It was incomprehensible that in the decades following the fall of Nazi Germany, such a prison would be erected in the heart of Berlin, with the sole purpose of keeping an entire population of people under guard. The existence of the wall encapsulated his abhorrence of the Communist state. What kind of society, he wondered, can function only by trapping its citizens and forcing them into compliance? There could be no justification in ideology or necessity for such an abomination. Why was the Western world—and the United States!—so complicit in the continuation of this travesty? That wall should come down, he thought. He returned to the United States haunted by what he had experienced. By the third year of Carter’s presidency, it was becoming clear that there was going to be an opening for a strong contender. The professor and historian Andrew E. Busch captured Carter’s core dilemma well, writing that not only was he besieged by economic crises, but in his posture toward the Soviets “he became Teddy Roosevelt in reverse, speaking loudly and carrying a twig. An increasing majority of Americans thought Carter too small for the job.” If Carter had been elected in a post-Watergate cleansing, his moral authority was diminished by his failures of governance.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“Reagan thought Schlesinger had been fired because Ford did not want to deal with the growing imbalance of nuclear arsenals. The goal, Reagan argued, should be to fight the Communists, not to appease them.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

“The accords had placed them on an equal playing field, no longer allowing the United States to negotiate from a position of strength. It was a kumbaya moment, an embrace made without good faith by the Soviets.”
― Bret Baier, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire